Walters and Ingram: the exit interview

CRN: What role would you want to have within a reseller? Sales? Business?

I really think it depends on the type of reseller. If you go to a larger one then a more functional role; if it's a smaller one then a broader role. But it depends on what the reseller wants and where they're going. One thing I hope I pride myself in is I don't have an ego therefore adding value is the most important thing for me.

CRN: Your family must be pleased that you're stepping down from the role?

I think they will enjoy spending a little bit more time with me over the Christmas period. We've got a skiing holiday planned for January in Canada so I think that'll be good.

Sholto: Do you think other disties are going to make similar restructures to be competitive?

Walters: From a distribution point of view I think there's a lot of more niche distributors who are really well positioned within their niche. Whether that is networking, services, software licensing,  server, storage or virtualisation focused, whatever it is, the challenge we've got at Ingram is we're across all of that plus consumer electronics and mass merchants and everything else.

So it's really hard to compete against those more niche focused areas unless you employ a more niche focused strategy and intellectually property and go-to-market structure within your organisation.

And that's what we were trying to do at Ingram. We started that when we started the solutions group. It's not a revolution what Jay has announced, it's an evolution.

I must admit I'm really proud to have had a hand in that and I'll be watching with interest from the sidelines to see how they execute because at the end of the day everything is in the execution. We can all plan but it's the execution that's important. And under Jay's leadership I'm pretty sure they'll give it a bloody good go.

CRN: What's your best memory from Ingram?

The two things that really made me feel proud was re-harnessing SMB in regional Australia and all of the effort we went into there to look after the small and regional business [in the AustraliaWide campaign for Tech Pacific]. I think we tried hard to [tell regional businesses that] we wanted to listen to you and deal with you. The feedback we got was fantastic and the actual results we got were fantastic.

That really fills you with pride. Because that was a campaign where everyone had to roll their sleeves up and do it from the heart rather than from the head.

[The other proud accomplishment was setting up the Solutions Group].

I suppose one of the other things I was pretty proud of was when Jay was new, he came into Australia he's a very smart and very aggressive guy and over twelve months I was able to hopefully give him a bit of a running start in Australia and introduce him around.

The restructure he's announced is largely a case of myself and others taking it this way but obviously it's his leadership and energy taking it to the next level. So I think I helped Jay for twelve months getting settled into Australia and that is good.